Project: Calypso

When I started my trial at Automattic back in April… I learned about this really amazing project that was being crafted deep within the heart of Automattic, called Calypso.

Since that day… I can’t express how hard it has been not to share my excitement with all of my WordPress friends. I’m thrilled that it has now launched and I can tell you all about it.

Calypso is a new approach to WordPress.com. It moves WordPress.com away from MySQL and PHP. It’s built entirely in JavaScript, and communicates with WordPress.com only using our REST API. It’s fast. It’s slick. The mobile experience is just great and to top it all off it’s also 100% open sourced.

I’ve been working with WordPress and thus wp-admin for almost 6 years now. So wp-admin is second nature to me, and will have a special place in my heart.

Yet having the chance to work on the new editor in Calypso and see how fast it is… I’m really excited about where the project is heading. I’m confident you will be too.

The WordPress codebase is actually incredible in many ways — the result of many thousands of people collaborating over 13 years — but some of WordPress’ greatest strengths were also holding it back.

and further detailing what exactly was holding it back…

Many of us attempted to give it a reboot with the MP6 project and the version 3.8 release, but what that release made clear to me is that an incremental approach wouldn’t give us the improvements we needed, and that two of the things that helped make WordPress the strong, stable, powerful tool it is — backward compatibility and working without JavaScript — were actually holding it back.

I also really enjoyed Andy Peatling’s (who is the lead on the Calypso project) take on it when he said:

Our existing codebase and workflows had served us well, but ten years of legacy was beginning to seriously hinder us from building the modern, fast, and mobile-friendly experiences that our users expect. It seemed like collaboration between developers and designers was not firing on all cylinders. So we asked ourselves the question:

“What would WordPress.com look like if we were to start building it today?”

So there you have it. Give it a spin! I can’t wait to hear what you think about the New WordPress.com

Meanwhile, here is a handy chart on the differences between wp-admin and the New WordPress.com.

Will this be replacing wp-admin?

WordPress users have the option to use wp-admin. Whether the Calypso codebase eventually becomes part of core WordPress and replaces WP-Admin is up to the WordPress community. You can read more about it in the FAQ here.